Dan's Film Festival Diary for Saturday, April 7

Films: Paprika, 12:08 East of Bucharest

Future Screenings: Paprika, April 8, Prince at 9:45PM
12:08 East of Bucharest, April 8, Ritz Five at 9:30PM

Stop me if you've heard this one before: "It's just a movie; you're not supposed to think about it. If I wanted to think, I'd read a book." Movies, in the popular conception, are either mindless entertainment or the sort of medicinal experience you wouldn't voluntarily seek out. Well, let me offer Exhibits One and Two for the defense. Both movies I saw today combine a heady exploration of the big questions of civilization with a commitment to basic, crowd-pleasing entertainment.

Paprika
Unlike most of my (geeky) friends, I'm not much of a fan of mind-bending anime like Akira or Ghost in the Shell. I don't put a lot of emotional stock in the existence of a hand-drawn "reality," so finding out that it's not real in story terms either doesn't exactly thrill me. But while the genre tends (unfortunately) to wallow in mindless surrealism, Paprika has a canny, if skewed, logic underlying even its most outre moments. Director Satoshi (Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress) Kon gives the movie a propulsive energy as it leaps from dead-on action-movie parody to a (hilarious) primer on the basics of film editing. If you asked me what it was about, I'd had trouble answering; but for once, I would have too many answers for you, not too few.
Festival Rating: Very Good.

12:08 East of Bucharest
After ninety minutes of Paprika's six-impossible-things-before-breakfast style and an exhausting headlong rush across town to make my next movie, Corneliu Porumboiu's commitment to international arthouse technique (i.e., scenes that last as long as a single, stationary shot, with an emphasis on what goes on off-screen and the disjunction between foreground and background) came as a blessed relief. The title refers to the time that dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu fled the country of Romania, signalling the end of communism; and the story climaxes during a talking-heads show, which is shown in its entirety. I felt reasonably confident sitting down that I was looking at a sedate, cerebral experience where I could nod off for a couple of minutes and still have enough impressive-sounding things about how Truth is unknowable or something to write in this here review.

So needless to say, I was completely flummoxed when 12:08 East of Bucharest became—and I speak without exaggeration—the single funniest movie that I've ever seen at the Film Festival. Porumbiou, it turns out, is dressing up a screwball plot in art-house drag. The TV show at the movie's heart has the same logic as the climax of a Marx Brothers movie, as the movie's distinctly Eastern European comedy of disappointment is ratcheted up to a breathless extreme. (If I sound a little vague, I apologize, but I don't want to spoil any of the gags.) Incredibly, Porumboiu doesn't sacrifice any of his ideas for humor's sake. There hasn't been a movie this smart and this funny since South Park last invaded Canada.
Festival Rating: Excellent.